Category Archives: Hype

This feels slightly weird but in the run-up to the launch of Room Little Darker next Wednesday, 31st May (Hodges Figgis, 6pm, all welcome!) I wanted to post this author interview Catherine Dunne did with me on her website as it discusses some of the stories in the book as well as wider themes. So excuse the narcissism, and enjoy!

1 – ‘SOMAT’ is also part of this new story collection. Narrated from the point of view of a foetus, it is, among other things, a howl of outrage against the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution which can reduce pregnant women in Ireland to the status of incubators. But it is the irreverent inventiveness of the language that really grabs the reader by the throat. Can you give us an insight into how you gave life to this particular voice?

Marlise Munoz

J.C.: – There were two Frankensteinesque stories of women held captive in monstrous situations in 2014 that really smashed me in the gut and made me angry as hell. A woman from Texas called Marlise Munoz, who was 14 weeks pregnant with the couple’s second child when her husband found her unconscious on their kitchen floor. She’d suffered an pulmonary embolism. Though doctors pronounced her brain dead and her family explicitly said they didn’t want machines keeping her body alive, officials at John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth felt differently.

The law in Texas is very like ours in Ireland. It required them to maintain life-sustaining treatment for a pregnant patient as long as there was a foetal heartbeat. Keeping a woman alive against nature’s will (her body was essentially rotting and she had to be drowned out in ‘somatic’ medicines to keep her ‘technically’ alive) as a human incubator when the baby/foetus is in no way viable was such a hideous scenario.

Her family fought their own grief and powerlessness for eight long weeks, having to go to court several times, before she could be taken off the machines. Think of the trauma of that? And the law is supposed to be there to ‘protect’ you?

Her husband, Erick Munoz, argued that sustaining her body artificially amounted to ‘the cruel and obscene mutilation of a deceased body’ against her wishes and those of her family. That was at the beginning of the year.

June Caldwell’s stories are the roar of fury and clarity that Irish fiction has been needing – no really, it has. You haven’t read anything like this before. You haven’t had anything before like the headspin that these stories will give you. And it doesn’t hurt that they’re gaspingly, gutsily hilarious, as well as formally brave and unbothered with the rules. Just brilliant – Belinda McKeon

At the end of the year, an almost identical situation happened in Ireland. A woman who had suffered a spontaneous ‘brain’ trauma who was 18 weeks pregnant, ended up at the mercy of bonkers legislation in an ‘unnamed’ hospital, being fought over by medical staff, legal eagles and the Catholic church. The hospital refused her family’s request to discontinue artificial life support, citing ‘the country’s strict abortion law’ as their guideline. Then there was the usual circus offerings: lawyers representing the rights of the woman and of the fetus, but not her family, said they accepted the ruling from the country’s second-highest court.

Pro-life organisations saw the lingering horror as a kind of triumph in real-time and the men in dresses were issuing statements from stained-glass windows on God’s law over woman’s fate.

It was insane and really upsetting to read about. One doctor commented that the fetus was essentially “facing into a ‘perfect storm’ from which it has no realistic prospect of emerging alive.”

Even the most cogent argument couldn’t alter the facts, the ‘baby’ had nothing but distress and death ahead. The hospital was afraid of being sued for negligence or having to face murder charges under a 1983 constitutional ban on abortion, the strictest in Europe. Keeping her deteriorating body functioning only with the help of machines and drugs deprived her “of dignity in death”.

It subjected her father, her partner and her young children to “unimaginable distress in a futile exercise which commenced only because of fears held by treating medical specialists of potential legal consequences,” the court decided.

And of course, Government officials said the ruling would be studied for possible exceptions to the blanket ban on abortion. We live in a time where we are contemplating colonies on Mars and yet there are women left lingering in this freakish state in our hospitals, with their families suffering ridiculously.

It boiled my piss.

I wanted to write a story that reflected the trajectory of horror and I felt that it was best told from the fetus’s perspective, to highlight the hideousness. After spending years in journalism and being restricted on what you could say and how you could say it, I firmly believe that fiction can be more effective, more politicised.

wrote the story in a fit of anger to the 3,000 word brief (which was hard to do and sent it into Sinéad Gleeson, who was editing The Long Gaze Back anthology).

I was really nervous about how it would be received, if it came across as offensive, if it would get people talking. It turned out to be one of the most talked about stories in the collection.

The Open University now want it on their MA in Creative Writing (fiction module) and have asked permission to use it for the next nine years. That gave me hope that I have it in me to make a difference. Up until that point I had no idea if I could write a short story or not. Writing the story helped me understand the stupidity of our laws and the need to Repeal the Eighth Amendment and go for a referendum. I hope it happens. It needs to happen.

June Caldwell’s writing is audacious, wicked and profoundly funny; her prose cracks and sizzles. The stories in Room Little Darker are literary electrical storms and Caldwell’s voice is a genuinely fresh, bold and welcome addition to the Irish scene – Nuala O’Connor

2 – The characters in your stories often inhabit a nightmarish world, such as that wildly imagined one in ‘Imp of the Perverse’. They are frequently transported there by the ferocity of sexual desire:

‘In the garden I watch the guests through the heat of amber eyes. Grasses bristle and jostle. I stretch forward to lie flat in the flimsy sunshine of early evening. The clouds are hungry and my mouth waters. Wind tears at itself as I pull layers from the sky to lay over me. Laughter grey and mocking. They do not know the danger love carries.’

Can you talk to us about this – about ‘the danger love carries’ in your stories?

J.C.: – Well, yes, in adult life we are obliged to be ‘civil’ always, aren’t we, to be well behaved?

We’re not marauding teenagers anymore.

But sometimes we can’t or don’t choose our desires and the people who counter-inhabit them. They choose us. They untangle us. They sweep in from the unconscious and take us over, eat us up, make fools of us, flood us. Crazy behaviour can only follow. Desire as the invisible puppeteer. And these desires are often strongest where hierarchies exist, where taboo beckons, where warped lust lurks. In this story I wanted to look closely at two stereotypes: the randy professor who has more choice than sense, and the love-struck MA student who at first is overwhelmed by a genuine admiration for him and his work, but pretty soon that morphs into a dangerous longing.

The longing takes over and acts as Theatre Director in the drama, leading into murky corners, embarrassing come-ons. He, of course, plays with this at first, before becoming sickened or appalled by her. He is used to seducing women with his mind, ‘pinning’ with his eyes, flinging provocative sentences, lassoing.

He sees himself as a Gingermantype character and everyone is fair game.

Until the game goes wrong.

His character is quietly psychopathic. He’s addicted to the pleasure he gets from luring people in, of women wanting him, lasciviousness. He pulls the strings, the wires, he cracks the whip. His position also allows for this. It is the milky environment of emotional cancer, the alkaline is missing. He has a vast brain and deeply abusive psychological patterns that direct him. He’s also a fail-safe opportunist.

She’s not a victim though.

She’s also very clever and plays the ‘little girl’ around him a lot, knowing he likes the dynamism of that. But then she loses control and spills overboard, along with her sanity, ending up in the freezing cold sea. The only way she can cope with the idea of him is to turn him into an animal in her head, where he is predator and she is [willing] prey.

All well and good, but the game goes wrong when she realises he has no interest in her. She cannot compete with what he normally goes for. She unravels. Self-annihilation and destruction consume her. It’s all a bit disgusting and shameful. On the surface she seems to be the gudgeon, the martyr.

But then she examines his behaviour inside the kaleidoscope of power and realises that he can behave as he likes. The expectations on her, in the ‘lower’ hierarchical role, are more demanding and rigid. She gets angry and this perpetuates even more destructive behaviour. It’s a no-win. Going back is futile, revenge is futile, going forward is futile. She is straitjacketed. He will never like her, consider her, want her. His available pool of lovelies who admire him endlessly is so large, he drowns in it. They both drown, but in different ways. In the end she wanders into the ‘den’ and has a breakdown. What will happen when she emerges from that desolate place and sees more clearly? Sees that he’s just a man (how boring!).

What then? Will she feel remorse, will she feel sorry for him? Will she learn important things about herself? He doesn’t care however, and formally complains, consequence pours in regardless. She’s punished severely for her ‘transgression’. He’s every right to do what he does.

He’s also every right to bob along never scrutinising his own behaviour because he never believes he causes damage. It’s all just light-hearted ‘stuff’ to him. Maybe he is the ‘victim’ here, maybe he did nothing wrong.

She could be just relentlessly nuts after all. I want the reader to consider the macro, to like and hate and understand both characters. The meaning of meaninglessness! I use Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘Imp of the Perverse’as a type of metaphor or structure for the story. In his original short story, which Poe wrote in part as an essay, he first discusses the narrator’s self-destructive impulses, embodied as the symbolic metaphor of The Imp of the Perverse.

The narrator describes this spirit as the agent that tempts a person to do things ‘merely because we feel we should not.’ He talks about how we are compelled to ‘commit acts’ against our self interest in life, that this is part of our intrinsically destructive impulses as human beings. The guilt that’s produced afterwards (even if we ‘confess’ to our ridiculous behaviour, our sins) is also futile. No one cares! Poe’s character eventually commits murder, gets away with it, but the overwhelming desire [triggered by an ‘invisible fiend’ pursuing him, the conscience] to confess leads him to the hangman’s alley.

I thought it would be the perfect metaphor to look at destructive desire and the crippling lonely lows it can lead us into.

I use some of Poe’s text in the story, sneakily.

It’s there in some of the sentences, but the modern context of the setting submerges the original text.

The moral of the story is that desire can be as treacherous as love is relative. We need to know how to handle it, how to bury it, how to accept defeat and walk off, how to forgive ourselves. Ultimately how to accept that sometimes we have no control. Perhaps it’s the only way we can truly learn.

This story could also be written about a priest and one of his congregation, a paedophile and a child, an alligator zig-zagging towards a juicy deer strolling aimlessly by. Ying without the Yang, sexual chemistry in a cul-de-sac.

Poe’s theory of the Imp of the Perverse is an early notion of the subconscious and repression which would not be fully theorised until Freud.

When people meet they’ve no real idea what private psychologies they’re banging off. It’s why we have boundaries in life. Rules. When we ignore them, or evade our own splurging instincts, we get into trouble. It was too tempting to have the student protagonist ‘win’ in the end by ripping him to shreds for hurting her, but that’s not realistic. The end is deliberately anti-climactic. Maybe they are both still out there and have learnt nothing in their separate dusty cubby-holes. That’s what I imagine anyway. Love, lust, desire, even the ugly deluded kind, are potentially traumatic and betraying to the delicate self. There is no midway point, no resolve, no understanding. We become marked, spoiled, swinging off the rope forever. Tread carefully and make sure there’s rubber soles on your slippers to cope with the rain.

June Caldwell’s stories are savagely inventive, full-throttle snapshots of the creepy, pitiable world it seems we all now have to live in. If the ghost of Angela Carter and a hungover George Saunders ever got together, they might turn out tales as full of the righteous ire and strychnine wit as the uproarious stories in Room Little Darker – Colin Barrett

3 – Your writer’s imagination seems to me to be a heady mix of hilarity and horror. In the visceral tale ‘Upcycle’, a daughter recalls the chilling abuse of a now-demented father. Yet the tale is leavened with a hearty dose of black humour, such as the mother’s futile attempt, long ago, to ‘poison his stew’. There are many times when the reader laughs, and then feels uncomfortable for laughing. Can you talk to us about the role of humour in your stories?

J.C.: – I always see the funny even in the horrific or even just in the ‘every day’.

Maybe it’s a feeling of healthy dislocation, but I find a lot of life ‘unreal’, and that also includes how we cope with memory. I’ve never grown up, essentially. We forget too that there are always two in a tango, that everyone bears the weight of responsibility, for their relationships, for their actions, and most tellingly, for their lack of action.

The crime of nonchalance, of missing the point of life. The ‘wife’ character in ‘Upcycle’is portrayed first of all as a bit of a victim but really we have to ask ourselves, what’s in it for her staying with a man like that? Is it societal pressure of the time (the story swings back and forth from the 1970s and 1980s to the present day where the ‘husband’ is in a nursing home)? Again it is a story about the shifting sands of power: a man who is a bully in his marriage but is now out of control with the mites of madness eating his brain, behaves accordingly.

He loses control but tries to regain some of that control by haunting his family. Is he really haunting them or is it their own conscience playing havoc in the aftermath of a traumatic situation? The house becomes a metaphor for the man’s strong seething will and starts to break up all around them (the wife and daughter).

I guess there’s unintentional humour in that.

In the scenario itself. Fun in the absurd. We expect justice in life, appeasement, release from hard situations. It often doesn’t arrive, it doesn’t grace our doorstep.

Life tells us, ‘You picked this shit, deal with it, smell it, stick it right up your nose.’ Humour is sometimes our only saviour. Without giving too much away, by the end of the story, the protagonist realises that the father was always terrified of them, while they lived it in real time the other way around. Humour in hopelessness, the wrangle for reason.

What else is there to do sometimes but laugh? I hope that there is fun and humour is most of these stories. In ‘Leitrim Flip’ for instance, the scenario is horrific, but again the couple’s predicament in the cage is a consequence of not thinking things through clearly. There’s buffoonery in the role reversal: the ‘submissive’ character relents and accepts her fate. The ‘Master’ continually fights their predicament and refuses to accept it. Yet in his traditional role he’d expect her to handle anything he’d dream of dishing out.

In ‘The Man Who Lives In A Tree’, the tree is seemingly a ‘friend’ but Rashi soon realises that he’s a malevolent git. A Facebook friend who was sent a review copy wrote to me today to say she had ‘nightmares’ after reading the story.

She dreamt Liam Neeson turned into the tree and chased her.

I couldn’t stop laughing at that image. If I give people nightmares or make them laugh, I’ve done my job as a writer.

My 83-year-old Ma asked me why I wrote about ‘a tree who could talk’, and I said, ‘why not?’ Hippies believe that trees whisper and have voices. Maybe they do. And we, as people, as wreckers of the environment must piss them off no end. But all we feel is pity for ourselves, not for the havoc we wreak. The tree doesn’t care too much for humans, even ones like Rashi who are homeless and desperate. Why should it? That shouldn’t be funny, but maybe it is. I also feel guilty sometimes about using humour in inappropriate ways.

In ‘Dubstopia’ we should feel nothing but concern for the heroin addict character, but we end up laughing at the pointlessness of his day, at his own lack of control, at a city sizzling in menace. When I worked at the Irish Writers Centre, I remember one day standing outside in the porch to get some air, and I saw this really dishevelled junkie, he looked in a terrible state, really emaciated… and he stopped to read the menu outside Chapter One (you know, that really posh expensive Michelin star restaurant!). He looked like he’d emerged from a crumby bedsit, woken by the pains of hunger that pulled him out onto the street. He was reading the menu out loud driving himself mad! I knew it wasn’t funny per se, but I couldn’t stop laughing.

I felt bad but laughed for two days over that.

I felt ugly for my own immorality of being able to find this funny. It made me uncomfortable. I want my stories to do the same. Humour, laughter, to just plomp your face in your hands and say, ‘For fuck’s sake!’, is a great balm. We laugh uncontrollably from the time we’re babies and everything is hideous and new and distorted, to the hilarious cartoons of childhood that calm and teach us, to our mortifying teenage romances, right up to the myriad of things that can and do go wrong for us as adults. Humour is also a close colleague of pain. There is so much in life that is privately hellish or impossible to cope with. If we can take a moment to laugh, then isn’t that great? We’re all strolling towards the crematorium anyway. Imagine taking any of this shit seriously?

There is a seriously charged imagination at work here. Line by line, page by page, Caldwell brings a dangerous new voltage to the Irish short story – Mike McCormack

4 – Your stories deal with characters who find themselves ‘unmoored’ in a strange and hostile parallel universe. Although dark and terrifying, the world that you create is kept vibrant and somehow optimistic by the sheer energy of the language that you use – your metaphors are arresting, startling, illuminating. Is language or character the starting-point for you?

J.C.: – I love language!

I listen to how people speak, not formally, but how, you know, we have conversations in the pub or even in our heads (have you ever taken time out to listen to your head, it’s terrifying!) With ‘Natterbean’ for instance: that came about one day in a taxi. A junkie walked out in front of the cab and the taxi driver said, ‘I hate them fucking Natterbeans’. I asked him what he meant. ‘Every time they get into the car, they’re all ‘I’m natterbean up at the clinic and yer man said…’ and so on. It was his word for ‘I’m after been’, said in a frenzy. I thought, ‘I’m robbing that!’ Language straight off the street, right from the gob of a taxi man, you can’t get more Joycean than that.

Taxi men are the modern-day carriers of all things Ulysses.

Their warblings are a great example of how language is used to best effect in ordinary ways, in storytelling. Taxi men always tell you stories and they do it brilliantly.

We learn how to write ‘essays’ in school in Victoriana English. Short story writing is the opposite of that, in any fiction, we’re trying to mirror reality as we live and experience it. In SOMATthe foetus is not really talking like a foetus (we all know they can’t talk, right?) and the voice is peculiarly adult and ‘knowing’, but at the same time it breaks up/away into baby speak sometimes.

I wanted to give a flavour of ‘what if’. Voice for me is the most important thing in any writing. How that character inhabits their own reality. I admire writers who use language in subtle beautiful ways, but that’s not me.

My heroine in this regard is Eimear McBride, what she does with language in‘A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing’ is off the scale brilliant.

She knows how language is formed in the brain through her study of linguistics and she worked with that. It floored me. Seeing it performed on stage shook me to the core. It’s the best example of stellar use of language I can think of. I’m not in that league at all but I take inspiration from her.

I love reading a book where the character (and the writer in their role of occupying that character) seems almost possessed. Ross Raisin in ‘God’s Own Country’or even ‘The Lovely Bones’by Alice Sebold.

I hope that I use language effectively to make each of the stories different from one another. I’ve read short story collections where ‘the voice’ is the same throughout and while there’s great skill involved in achieving this, it’s not for me. I want each story to be so separate and identifiable from the next.

The average word usage for anyone using spoken English is between 20,000 and 35,000 words, but the Oxford English Dictionary lists at least 171,476 words with thousands of obsolete ones no longer in use. Look how much language has changed since the advent of social media? All those new buzz words and vowel-less offerings?

Language, like sexuality, is fluid, and it’s the writer’s job to exploit this to the best of their ability.

It’ll be interesting to see if some of the language in my ‘Oirish’ stories carries to an audience outside of here. Will it work or will it bore? Writers like James Kelman and Irvine Welsh have done Scottish street language proud. How will we move with the high-tech languages of the future and still stay true to our own unique way of expressing ourselves?

5 – After this blistering collection Room Little Darker, what’s next for June Caldwell, Writer?

J.C.: – I’ve a few short story commissions to write now (for The Lonely Crowd Welsh literary journal and Winter Papers here) and after that it’s time to return to an abandoned novella: a murderous tale about one of Ireland’s missing women, told from the dead, with a twist.

I was obsessed with the ‘triangle’ of missing murdered women that happened in the 1990s, but my story moves on a bit in time and looks at the idea of murderous intent and how so many men get away with the ultimate violence against women, and how as a country, we are still utterly unprepared to deal with that scenario.

I began the story on the MA in Belfast, but I’d never attempted fiction and it was very disparate and all over the place. That’s the next job at hand. After that, I may go for a ‘big’ novel. I also love hybrids: mixes of non-fiction and fiction. I feel like I’ve spent two decades in an incubator ‘waiting’ to write.

I can’t understand why I didn’t do it earlier. So I want to have all my babies now in quick succession. Then I’ll retire to the countryside to have as much sex as I can and look at the sea endlessly before I die. Well, hold on, I’m only in my forties so maybe there’s plenty of time to write a whole slew of disturbing books where I’ll be labelled a lunatic but one day someone will say ‘Yer one, she was a difficult narky character alright, but she could string a sentence together OK’. That to me, would be a life well lived.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the One City One Book initiative, showcasing some of the great literary works which have become synonymous with the city throughout its history. It’s 28 years since The Commitmentswas published, the first instalment of the Barrytown trilogy which had us all in stitches and set a new precedence for realistic Irish fiction (read as you hear it). The ordinary going-ons of a bunch of working class hedonistic musicians based on the north side of Dublin marked the end in literature of a youth supposedly choked by the church and abandoned in a hopeless and endless recession/suppression. In the same way that James Joyce put the cuffs on a ‘modernist’ take on Irish culture, Roddy Doyle’s savage hilarity of 1980’s suburban life gave people permission to be themselves regardless of where they came from and what they wanted to do in life. Unlike Joyce, this fiction was as accessible as it was memorable. The ‘success’ of the book’s band was irrelevant as one of the protagonists in the novel would later claim, ‘Sure we could have been famous and made albums and stuff, but that would have been predictable. This way it’s poetry.’

Do you not get it, lads? The Irish are the blacks of Europe. And Dubliners are the blacks of Ireland. And the Northside Dubliners are the blacks of Dublin. So say it once, say it loud: I’m black and I’m proud.

In a recent Irish Times article Doyle maintains little has changed for the residents of Ireland’s capital despite the events of intervening years. ‘People still get pregnant I think, don’t they? People are still unemployed, young kids still form bands, they still talk in much the same way they used to. The city has changed but it’s still the same place. The books came out of a recession. We didn’t use that word back then, it seemed like normal life in Dublin. The difference with this recession was that we had seen what life could be like so it came as an almighty shock. I think it took a while for the city and country to catch up with its sense of humour, there wasn’t much laughter in the first couple of years. Hard times seem to give birth to good humour’.

A one-page extract from The Commitments

The Commitments was voted best Irish film of all time in a 2005 poll sponsored by Jameson Irish Whiskey and launched a generation of Irish musicians and actors. It also won a BAFTA for Best Film. A follow-on The Snapper (my own personal favourite) revolved around unmarried Sharon Rabbitte’s (surname ‘Curley’ in the film) pregnancy, and the unexpected effects this has on her conservative family (Jaysus, me fanny!). Again it was made into a 1993 movie, this time for TV, directed by Stephen Frears and starring Tina Kellegher, Colm Meaney and Brendan Gleeson. The third in the series, The Van, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1991. Jimmy Rabbitte Senior (Sharon’s dad) is unemployed, spending his days alone and miserable. When his best friend, Bimbo, also gets laid off, they keep by being miserable together. Things seem to look up when they buy a decrepit fish-and-chip van and go into business, selling cheap grub to the drunk and the hungry–and keeping one step ahead of the environmental health officers.

Sara Baume, winner of the Davy Byrnes award this year, will release her debut novel Spill Simmer Falter Wither in 2015 (pic from The Irish Times).

Next year brings plenty of emerging talent to the bookshelves, both in Ireland and internationally.

Four brothers deal with a madman’s prophecy of violence in 1990s Nigeria in Chigozie Obioma’s The Fisherman (One, February). In Emma Hooper’s Etta and Otto and Russell and James (Fig Tree, January) Etta, an octogenarian, goes on a 3,000km journey to see the Canadian sea. Sara Taylor’s The Shore (William Heinemann, March) maps out the secrets of generations of women living off the coast of Chesapeake Bay, in Virginia. Sara Novic’s Girl at War (Little, Brown, May) explores the devastation wreaked by the Serbo-Croatian conflict. More Saras as we move to Ireland, with the Davy Byrnes 2014 winner, Sara Baume, one to watch for her poetically titled Spill Simmer Falter Wither (Tramp Press, February), which tells of an unlikely friendship between two outcasts in rural Ireland.Weightless (Bloomsbury, March), by Sara Bannan, focuses on cyberbullying with the arrival of a new girl at an Alabama high school. A murder in Lisa McInerney’s The Glorious Heresies(John Murray, April) affects the lives of five misfits in postcrash Ireland. From Ireland to Illinois, Paula McGrath’s short novel Generations (John Murray, July) delivers interlinked stories of multiple characters as they seek to rebuild their lives after loss. Set in Victorian England’s theatre district, The Curtain Falls(Ward River, March), by Carole Gurnett, details the secret life of a gay writer. Henrietta McKervey’s What Becomes of Us(Hachette Ireland, April) looks at the role of Cumann na mBan in the 1916 Rising from the perspective of a journalist in 1960s Ireland. Debut authors are also well represented in the short-story form, with Andrew Fox’s Over Our Heads (Penguin, April) and Thomas Morris’sWe Don’t Know What We’re Doing (Faber, August). The Stinging Fly continues its tradition of publishing new talent with Claire-Louise Bennett’s Pond (April) and Danielle McLaughlin’s highly anticipated collection due later in the year. Short Fiction Ireland’s love affair with the short story continues to grow, with a host of new anthologies and collections on the way. The Hennessy Book of Irish Fiction 2005-2015, edited by Dermot Bolger and Ciarán Carty (New Island, March) is the third anthology in the series chronicling an emerging literary generation.

Sinéad Gleeson, who will edit an anthology of 30 Irish women authors in 2015

The Irish Times contributor Sinéad Gleeson is at the helm of a collection of Irish female writers, among them Éilis Ní Dhuibhne, Anne Enright, Christine Dwyer Hickey and Nuala Ní Chonchúir. New Island also releases the seventh instalment in its Open Door series, featuring novellas by Roddy Doyle, Catherine Dunne, Colette Caddell, Ciara Geraghty and Claudia Carroll. As Gaeilge, Micheál Ó Conghaile makes a welcome return with Diabhlaíocht Dé (Cló Iar-Chonnacht, May), his first collection in 12 years. A combination of traditional prose, poetry, monologue and music, Alf Maclochlainn’s Past Habitual (Dalkey Archive Press, March) depicts an Ireland struggling with the effects of war. Edited by Deirdre Madden, All Over Ireland (Faber, May) is a mix of emerging and established Irish writers, including Colm Tóibín, Eoin McNamee and Mary Costello. Under the Rose (Faber, June) is a new collection of previously published stories by Julia O’Faolain, with an afterword from the author looking back on her work. In keeping with the themes of his novels, the human cost of loneliness and displacement is at the centre of Donal Ryan’s first collection of short stories, A Slanting of the Sun (Doubleday Ireland, September). Collections from international authors to watch out for include Honeydew (John Murray, January), by the American writer Edith Pearlman, and the Impac winner Juan Gabriel Vasquez’s The All Saints’ Day Lovers.

You have to wonder about gits with money when it comes to all things Titanic. In 2007, a ‘collector’ bought a [used] Titanic life jacket for £35,000 from a UK auction house. Battered, ocean-licked and torn, it had been worn by a 3rd class passenger sparring for survival in the Findus-cold waters of the North Atlantic 100 years ago today. A few months later another life jacket sold for a staggering €119,000 – thought to be worn by the secretary to the wife of Cosmo Duff-Gordon – accused of bribing crew members not to return their half-filled rowboat to the sinking ship to pick up survivors. Class division has a price tag, even in an era of relics.

Business man Mark Manning is banking on a £2 million sale by breaking up and selling a tiny piece of the liner’s hull. The fragment was a scientific sample from the larger of only two known segments of the hull salvaged from the wreck in 1998 (Mark acquired his piece last year for £12,000, according to the Chester Chronicle) and formed part of the ship’s adjoining cabins C79 and C81. While Mark’s lump of liner is ‘privately owned’, the two larger pieces of hull and the rest of the New York auction, valued at around £122 million, must go to a single buyer with strict conditions relating to storage and preservation. “I will sell it to the highest bidder,” he told the paper. “Or I can get a guy to cut it into just over 1,000 pieces and I can sell them for £2,000 a time, if you do the maths, 1,000 x £2,000 = £2m”. He also acquired a wooden segment of the grand staircase from first class, a lump of coal from the boiler room and a fragment of a discarded off cut of carpet.

Since 1985, when the wreck of the Titanic was discovered, thousands of sodden souvenirs have been hauled to the surface in seven expeditions: leather trunks, china plates, letters, shoes, wallets, candlesticks, keys to a first class toilet, rivets (one rivet made $15,000 at auction), a brass thunderer whistle, Clews teapot, creamer and sugar basin, tickets for the Titanic’s Turkish bath, Marconigram messages, White Star Line candy dish, deck chair, a steel section that broke away from the starboard side as the ship sank, lockets, gold coins, cuff-links, jewellery made with ‘authentic coal’ from the ship, have all found plenty of buyers. Titanic fanatics are also willing to pay $91,000 to get up close to the ship in small Russian submarines.

There’s no end to the line-dance of lucrative packrats prepared to pay top Euro/Dollar/Sterling/Ruble for lumps of the 46,329 tonne rust-bucket, in the hope of salvaging an ordinary piece of human anguish. A restaurant in Houston served up a $12,000 ‘last supper’ this week in honour of Titanic’s infamous Ritz restaurant. It hired top chefs to cook up an ice storm of consomme olga, poached salmon with dill-flavoured mousseline sauce, calvados-glazed roast duckling, pate de foie gras, asparagus salad with champagne-saffron vinaigrette, peaches in chartreuse jelly and chocolate eclairs. Titanic buffs and memorabilia hunters with lots of dough can jig like the dickens and fantasise goodo about herding bonnet-clad women into lifeboats, while smoking Garcia Perlas Finas cigars.

Some items recently up for grabs (in the currency they sold in) include:

Cigar box owned by captain Smith: £25,000

China saucer: $20,000

Postcard mailed from the Titanic: $2,068

Rivet: $15,000

Original launch ticket: $70,000

Keys to a first class toilet: $53,000

Menu found in 1st class purse: £76,000

Letter written by Captain E J Smith: £28,000

Titanic’s lamp trimmer: £59,000

Letter by steward James Arthur Painton: £15,000

Lillian Asplund’s personal collection (she was 5 years old when travelling on Titanic, her three brothers and father drowned): £120,000

Job lot including letters, postcards, telegrams from survivors and photographs of passengers: $193,140

Deck log deck log from cable ship SS MacKay-Bennett: €100,000

First-class passenger list: £24,000

Victim’s watch [John Gill]: £25,000

Fragment of lifebelt: £6,900

First-class brochure: $ 11,380

Marine moonlighters & billionaire bandits could take inspiration from 47-yr-old Stan Fraser from Inverness. He built his own eco-friendly 100ft long Titanic model out his back garden complete with its own ‘Paris Bar’ without plundering a sea-morsel. Two caravans became the hull and over time he added a wooden shed and various cast-offs until his Ship of Dreams was complete. His model also features four funnels – three belch smoke, the fourth is just for show – just like the original. Any donations he receives from folk eyeballing his suburban compost ship go straight to the Royal National Lifeboat Institution.

Stan Fraser, by Peter Jolly Northpix/Daily Mail

The vast majority of the Titanic’s swanky furnishings remain in the two middle sections of the wreck but the ship is slowly being consumed by iron-eating microbes on the sea floor and won’t be around in another 50 years. It also rests in international waters, leaving it in a grey legislative area since no country can claim full responsibility for it. Now the UN’s heritage body Unesco is stepping in to protect the ship under a UN Convention on the Protection of Underwater Cultural Heritage, which covers wrecks only after a century has passed. It can impose fines and other civil penalties on anyone who disturbs the site and will hopefully pull the plug on a 27 year ghoulish treasure hunt. Maybe it’s now starting to sink in: “That’s the last of her.”

Nuala O’Faolain terrified me. I met her in May 1997 at her home in Ranelagh for a student interview. “You’re ‘too sensitive’ to make a go at journalism, too wide-eyed for shitheads in a newsroom,” she concluded, after just half an hour. Her family history had parallels with my own and despite the fact that she was completely intimidating, we somehow clicked. She scoffed a sausage sambo and laughed at me for being vegetarian. I was obliged to throw sticks at Molly the Collie and admire the ‘Victorian blue’ paint on the sitting room walls (sourced by her lodger Luke from a stately home in UK). Her grand plan was to live out latter days “writing about other people’s cats & dogs” in a cottage in Clare. Three hours later she drove me home in a battered car that could’ve belonged to a learner driver in Wexford and not a woman whose book Are You Somebody? was topping the best seller lists worldwide.

When I sent her the typed interview she thanked me by dumping a cat in a basket on my doorstep with a £20 note & strict instructions where to buy ‘Sandra’ a hysterectomy. ‘Anyone who wants to be fully human should own a cat,’ the note said. I zipped around to Tesco on Baggot Street, turning the nice crisp hysterectomy dosh into a bottle of bacardi, fresh pasta & some scented candles. Sandra got duffed by the lesbians-in-the-basement’s ‘Felix’ and three years later, while Editor of a revenue magazine, I emailed her to come clean. She called me ‘despicable’, saying I was the worst type of person there was. Nuala’s emails were hilarious, often sad, always sickeningly candid. I was forever chuffed to hear from her, even when she told me not to have kids, that I’d make a lousy mother (and various other insults): ‘You can’t even look after yourself or a cat, imagine what you’d actually do to another human being!’ Another email read: ‘Perhaps an interesting job isn’t your destiny June, so boredom and sexual frustration will force you to write fiction.’ Every few months she’d write to ask me how I was, without fail. Her messages were always packed with funny little nuggets of advice: ‘Don’t go to male shrinks, they’re even worse than ordinary males.’

In 2002, she agreed to be my ‘referee’ for a Foundation Course in Psychotherapy at the Tivoli Institute, Galway. ‘After you’re done there, there’s a place in north Belfast that does great training at weekends, you’d be a brilliant counsellor, I’d go to you, just don’t ever ask me for a writing reference’. It transpired I was way too neurotic for counselling training and Nuala changed her mind about a writing appraisal when she read a feature I wrote for the Sunday Business Post. Once again she ended up as rent-a-judge, this time for an MA in Creative Writing at Queens’ University Belfast in 2007. ‘You will soar, eventually, but the effort will probably kill you,’ she said. After she died I wrote an article in The Guardian which I think would’ve surprised her. Last night when RTÉ aired Nuala, a profile by a cherished friend, Marian Finucane, I dug out the original interview I wrote 15 years ago, which I’m pasting below. Bear in mind it was my first attempt at a journalistic profile (it’s written in the present tense of 1997), so some of the language is manuka-sticky, but a few worthwhile insights survive.

WATCHING NUALA O’ FAOLAIN EAT A SAUSAGE SANDWICH

Relations between men and women are in an awful state. The old world is dead, but there’s no new world yet, we don’t know what to do or which way to go. There’s young-ones with money taking over Temple Bar and old Dublin, Joyce’s Dublin, is dissolved into paltriness. The whole point to Dublin was that it was accessible, shabby, alive. People wandered around it all day. Now they go from A to B, spiritually impaired. The wandering has stopped and mass exodus towards apostasy has begun.

This is what Nuala O’Faolain feels today, 11 months after her book Are You Somebody? was released. This arresting memoir, by a dedicated controversialist, presented itself by pure accident and topped the best seller list for 20 weeks in 1996/7. The book indwells itself in the public and private life of Ireland, so much so, that Nuala herself is stunned at the emotional episode it has created. People wrote to her from Trinidad, Australia, China, Chicago, and even from a trekker’s hut in Nepal, to offer her images of themselves in response to hers. In an unpublished extract called ‘Afterwords’, she writes:

‘I never envisaged such cherishing. When I called my memoir Are You Somebody? it was largely to pre-empt the hostile people who’d say, at my writing anything about myself at all, ‘who does she think she is?’ I never imagined awakening something a bit like love.’

She was asked by New Island Books to write an introduction to a decade’s collection of journalism articles. She felt it was impossible without chronicling some fundamental aspects of her life. She had no intention of ‘writing a book’, rather the lengthy introduction was an unavoidable resolution to a complex and lacerated childhood.

‘Trying to live and push as much life into myself,’ is Nuala’s motto. “Sensation and feeling, that’s how I want to live. I want to really live. On the other hand I can hardly live because I am missing all kinds of skins that enable other people to live fully. I’m 57, but it’s as if I’m 17, trying to learn how to be happy. Yet sometimes I feel it’s not happening, because I’m the only person who knows about me.”

Her cat Hodge is so like Patrick Kavanagh it’s not funny! He has the same cynical pissed off expression and he’s a begrudger. I imagine PK’s eyes were as strikingly gold on occasion, when he woke half dead from alcohol. But Hodge doesn’t indulge in the ‘wrong’ kind of drink or write poetry. He’s a misanthropic feline, with attitude, Nuala adores him, despite his mucky personality. “I bought him off a sinister man for £150,” she explains. “They’re both the same, they don’t have very good personalities…ah sure Patrick had his good days too, like when he’d win on a horse and want to share everything with you!”

In her UCD years, Nuala shared a flat briefly with Patrick Kavanagh, who used to piss and groan out the doorway in the mornings. Dublin was dark and dramatic then…NoëlBrowne’s Socialist Party met regularly in Moran’s Hotel to discuss the future of Ireland. Students sat around Bewleys, scoffing potato pancakes, discussing ideas for short stories. Nuala spent many a night drinking bottles of Vintara in Leland Bardwell’s flat in Leeson Street, writing bits of scripts for Radio Éireann. There was an unselfconscious scattering of ideas all over the literary Dublin of the time. You were assessed in terms of yourself, and warmly welcomed if you fitted in.

In 1958, while studying English at UCD, things did not always run smoothly for Nuala. At one stage she had to drop out of University and work in a hospital kitchen in London. When she returned to Ireland, Mary Lavin gave her an allowance for six weeks so she could resit exams and finish her degree. Shortly afterwards she read ‘medieval romance’ at University of Hull and eventually secured a scholarship for a B.Phil in Literature at Oxford. After she graduated she taught English Literature (briefly) in Dublin, before moving on to the BBC in 1970.

She produced outlandish and stimulating programmes: protesting pornography with the Queen’s gynaecologist, querying religious sects that buried their prayers inside batteries at the San Andreas Fault, chronicling personal problems of Yorkshire transsexuals and a documentary on the Bogside Community Association. Yet she was never au fait with any aspect of her emigrant life. She became increasingly desolate and disaffected in the UK, to the point where she had not choice but to return home. The year was 1977. The same vigour that hauled her through those early years, was bulldozing her towards inescapable crisis. She signed herself into St. Patrick’s Hospital as a full-time alcoholic, addicted to tranquilizers, desperate for help. It became apparent that she had to go right back to the beginning of her life, and start again.

Nuala O’Faolain was born in 1940, in an era of art deco, when Cat Woman first appeared in comics, when faulty condoms were made out of sheep’s intestines and UFO sightings were reported on a world-wide basis for the first time. It was the same year John Lennon and Frank Zappa were born, and Scott Fitzgerald and Emma Goldman died. Irish ‘O’Faolain’ is a diminutive of ‘wolf’ and is among the fifth most numerous names in Ireland.

In 1939, Tomás O’Faolain joined the Irish Defence Forces, spending most of his spare time writing to his ‘chroidhe dhil’ (Nuala’s mother) with details of moving his young family to Donegal. The following year he cycled up to Dublin from Dunree on the Inishowen Peninsula to greet Nuala at the Rotunda hospital. Her mother and father were desperately in love. By the early 1940s, Tomás had metamorphosed into the auspicious Terry O’Sullivan. He began his journalism career by taking the ‘Radio Train’ to Killarney for Radio Éireann, and his ‘Dubliner’s Diary’ column for the Evening Press. His ostentatious career and social life, took him further and further away from home. Mrs O’Faolain, glorified wife and onlooker to numerous extra-marital affairs, began to feel totally cast aside. Increasingly, she sat in her armchair in the kitchen to drink and read. “This is how she chose to eventually die”.

Nuala attended seven schools in total, during these early years, when she lived in a farm-labourer’s cottage in North County Dublin. She was hauled off to boarding school in Monaghan in 1954, when puberty became ‘a problem’. There she nurtured her love of reading, and fostered an urge to learn. ‘My life only began when I learnt to read,’ Nuala once wrote. And she read everything she could get her hands on. Saul Bellow, Alice Munrow, Chekhov, Keats, Dacia Maraini, Dermot Healy, Joyce, Eoin MacNamee, Montherland, Richard Ford, Kaftka, Racine, Jane Eyre, Robert Lowell, T.S. Elliot, Shakespeare, Kawabata. For too many years novels were all Nuala cared about. She has read a book every few days of her life without fail. In later life, she sees the characters of decades, gathered around her, to keep her company.

“When I get on in age, I’ll have to write novels,” she insists. “Sure what else can I do here? I’m here on my own all the time: you can hardly call that living. I will go and live in Clare full-time and write my books, crammed with characters, men and women & other people’s cats and dogs.”

Her input in broadcasting has been sedulous and when she returned from England in the late 1970s, she took a job at RTÉ, producing the Open Door and Booklines programmes. Journalist Jonathan Philbin Bowman debated many issues with Nuala over the years, but states quite clearly that his various opinions of her don’t always fuse: “Nuala is a very fine writer, equally capable of great sensitivity and occasional near sanity. There are times when she is not sure herself, how to bridge that gap between intellect and passion. But overall, she is consistent in the amount of human compassion she shows people.”

Nuala joined the Irish Times in late 1980, following a conversation she had on radio with Gay Byrne, about elderly Irish women. Today, she is a highly respected columnist, who writes about all miens of Ireland in a unique, manifold way. Angela Bourke, writer and lecturer summed up her journalism in the following way: “They are essays that have urged us over the years, to pay attention to the weave of the society we live in, weft as well as warp. She notices always the threads that run always: the lives of women, of children, of quiet men, the hurts inflicted and forgotten or suffered and remembered. Class politics, gender politics, power relations. These are her particular themes.”

Some find her writing uncomfortable because she insists on adjusting to a certain understanding of how things really are. A certain amount of people recoil when truth flails around so unselfconcsiously, other embrace her honesty as if it were a long-awaited benefaction.

On Poverty: ‘If you live one of those local authority estates on the edge of small towns – the ones whose name appears predictably in the court reports of the local paper – who will care about you?’

On Drugs: ‘Hard drugs are the worst thing to happen to Ireland since the famine. But we forget, we lose interest, we fortunate ones can afford to.’

On Female Sterilisation: ‘Women are in no position to be airy-fairy about their bodies, they bleed, their wombs swell, they labour just like animals to bring forth children, then they feed them, wipe the waste from their bodies, shovel grunge into their mouths…to bring them through to independence.’

She writes her articles, pen avec paper, on a rough wood table in her kitchen, where we sit now. Molly the half Collie, runs in from the back garden with a stick for me. We fabricated a friendship in the isolated minutes after Luke, Nuala’s lodger, showed me in and handed me a cup of cha. Nuala trundled down the stairs, hair soaked, wearing a blue flowery dress and a big, amiable smile. There is an extraordinary expression in her eyes, as she talks unhindered, with a sausage sandwich hanging halfway out her gob.

“My lodger Luke is the dearest man in the world, but I am terrified of him coming in drunk, my whole life I’ve been watching people come in drunk.”

What comes across most fixedly about Nuala’s life is that she is dreadfully hurt by what she calls “one of those hugely damaged, big Irish families.” It is this unresolved ache that propels her to discover truths that would otherwise be unreachable. She has undoubtedly survived all the things that have entranced, beguiled, sickened and outraged her. Yet at this stage in her life, she feels she has no immediate or momentous purpose, and is very alone.

Sean MacConnell, Agricultural Correspondent in the Irish Times is probably Nuala’s closest confidant. He has known her well for ten years, and worked with her father in the Evening Press many years before. To sum up Nuala in a sentence he told me, “She is an amazingly bright, remarkably strong woman, with great integrity and great vulnerability.” His first impression of Nuala was that she was unbearably shy but had a suave charm. “Just like her father, the one thing that really stands out about Nuala is that life is a huge learning process, and because she is so open to new interpretation, she can be very unpredictable.”

Going back to the book where the explication of her life and success ultimately lies, I ask her why she began and ended with poignant accounts of her parent’s ill-fated marriage? “I hadn’t realised that I’d go back to them, I think out of some mixture of loyalty and being imprinted by pattern, I was trying to oblige them by ruining myself. I was tempted to join my mother in her despair all my life. I was actually very close to her, even though I didn’t like touching her or being with her. I pitied her so utterly that I copied her. I am very lucky they both died when I was about 40, it gave me a chance to live. I have been very lucky too, that there must’ve been some instinct for life in me, that I was lucky enough to get off with Nell, who insisted on life.”

She spent nearly two life-giving decades with Nell McCafferty until they split up last year [1996] when their many differences became insufferable. “Back to whole relationship/family thing: take my brother Don, who just died recently in London. He had a family of his own, but couldn’t let go of the past. He sat in his room and drank and starved himself and drank again, until he could die. He was just following out the logic of it.”

She tells a story about ‘Michael’ and ‘Rob’, her two tremendous loves featured in the book. They haven’t even bothered to drop her a line, or pick up the phone in response to her story being published. Her whole life it seems has been flooded by moments of unimaginable intensity, followed by long spells of desert, and all-consuming work in between. Her mother had been the same in this respect; nothing matters except passion, mythos is something to covet, something to adore…

On the way out the door, Nuala points to the rocking chair in the kitchen and says: “You know I sit there and drink red wine and read and read and read, just like Mammy.” When the car chugs off up the road, almost of its own accord, I ask her if she travels around the countryside a lot. “I do,” she says, “just like Dad did.” So at 57, writing, reading, drinking wine and contemplating how to live, she is a synthesis of her mother and father. How could she be anything else?

…and all that makes zero sense, I thought I’d lob in some of my random stream of consciousness Facebook updates below from the Bloomsday month of June 2009. Yes, disturbingly there’s an app that can do this. Still living in Belfast, just finishing an MA, not much work on the go, even less to do. No homosapien dead or alive should enjoy a monopoly on talking jibberyockerwocky. We can all talk crap but social networking is a giant Joycean gastric stomach. I would argue that the erratic, fragmentary ways we communicate online these days make texts like Ulysses more accessible or getatable than before. Making sense of the mind ministrations of others is something we now do routinely, trawling through the real-time droppings of the likes of Twitter, etc.

I’ve never celebrated Bloomsday before, but today we went to the Joycean Breakfast at the Brian Boru pub in Glasnevin, where chapter four of Ulysses was brilliantly orated by a wrinkled man clutching an embroidered linen snotrag. I always found chapters 1-3 completely unbearable, and usually threw Joyce to the immersion heater wall around about then, but today’s reading has encouraged me to go back to it. The last time I attempted to read it was in France on holidays a year ago, but gave up and my nine-year-old nephew began to mulch his head trying to make sense of it. “This guy is a nutjob Aunty June!” he exclaimed one morning, and then proceeded to tell me that it was blatantly obvious the author was “sitting inside an online game” in the way he was describing his surroundings. Young Jake had grabbed Joyce by the scruff of his quark and taken him into a future he could not have pipe dreamed in an Edwardian pub.

Sitting there today on a stump stool listening to Bloom describe another type of stool hammered home how monologuing in Ulysses is similar to the self-referential puke-ups of laptop life. Though invariably it’s also little or nothing to do with literature or the making of stories. An interesting resource for Bloomsday info is the BBC Book of the Week which discusses at length, how the idea for Joyce’s ‘masterpiece’ was conceived. There’s Twitter-generated novels already but I haven’t heard of the solo-authored Facebook variety. It’d be arduous as hell to drop a story arc in there and still make it believable with the separation of update hours and days, though I’ve no doubts a young sniffy Joycean lit-nerd (probably American) will achieve it soon. There’s a Facebook Status Update Novel project though a lot of these collaborations run out of steam quickly when the initial hilarity passes. Here’s an old month-long spue of mine dated backwards for the ultimate fried kidneys Joycean aspergers in a bread tin effect.

Tue June 30, 2009, 3:01 pm: Editing a financial website from my mattress. Great not having to deal with dicks in an office. I can also stay unwashed & eat fish fingers for breakfast.

Tue June 30, 2009, 12:03 pm: Having MSG for tea in the hope that it brings on peripheral brain poisoning.

Tue June 30, 2009, 11:21 am: Drunk on the synthetic fumes of a nasty cheap scented candle that should really be reserved for funeral homes or an antidote for cat litter trays.

Tue June 30, 2009, 7:31 am: Seriously looking for a sperm donor. Any idiot will do. Last chance for a sprog alarm to wake me in the mornings.

Tue June 30, 2009, 2:28 am: Blown away (not in a good way).

Mon June 29, 2009, 1:10 pm: Waded through a bizarre day that started with a plethora of scangers on DLA scooters, then some unwanted blood, finally ending in financial markets of Singapore in a rich man’s house.

Sun June 28, 2009, 7:37 am: It was impossible to escape pics of plastic Paris forward slash pottery Michael today…but wasn’t he supposed to be ‘frozen’ immediately and not ever put forward for autopsy?

Fri June 26, 2009, 2:15 am: Apparently it was an inherited condition Wacko died of….something called the Billy Gene?

Thu June 25, 2009, 3:29 pm: The Paedo of Pop is dead.

Thu June 25, 2009, 3:25 pm: Gung-ho for her bro who’s having a very serious operation tomorrow. Love him so utterly.

Thu June 25, 2009, 9:57 am: Appalled at the cynicism re: Hetty Hoover, I felt the same when all you Celtic Tiger dicks bought wooden decking patios and steel kitchens on yezer credit cards. Ha.

Thu June 25, 2009, 5:02 am: Sore back and smells like an abandoned herring but nevertheless I am up and that’s a start.

Thu June 25, 2009, 2:08 am: If you have a roving eye, it’s no use having the other one fixed on Heaven.

Wed June 24, 2009, 1:32 pm: Was Harvey Norman trained by the Taliban?

Wed June 24, 2009, 11:31 am: Why do anarchists with pink hair always seem to get beaten up at climate change get-togethers? Also, don’t they realise what those (often unregulated) ridiculously toxic hair-dye chemicals do to the environment they’re prepared to get slapped on Sky TV for?

Wed June 24, 2009, 3:07 am: Anxiously awaiting the arrival of Hetty Hoover. She has eyelashes for the extra tenner!

Tue June 23, 2009, 4:41 pm: Just set eyes on a hideous woman with a double-buggy and loaded down with ‘feel good’ Boots bags full of prawn cocktail sandwiches and a plastic sash around her emblazoned with ‘Bride To Be’.

Tue June 23, 2009, 10:07 am: Had a ‘homemade’ microwaved chick pea curry full of d-Nitrosodiethanolomines & a pitta as hard as a Braintree drug dealer. However, the rosé wine on tap tasted a bit like ladybird kisses.

Tue June 23, 2009, 7:52 am: Just saw this on a ‘kid’s health website’ – ‘You cannot catch gonorrhoea from a towel, a doorknob, or a toilet seat.’ Shocked to find out about the doorknobs…all those years wasted opening doors with my feet.

Tue June 23, 2009, 7:20 am: Is a fat prawn for yet another summer; interesting things happen with sweat in crevices when your BMI hits over 30. Any personal trainers out there want to deal with an angry neurotic for free?

Tue June 23, 2009, 2:03 am: Full of empathy…but maybe now I’ll get my friends back…those fabulous folk who turned into arseholes for ten years talking about holiday homes & house renovations they couldn’t afford. Sorry to take another slant, but being broke will be good for Ireland.

Mon June 22, 2009, 12:24 pm: Ponders the dull fact that women named Patricia are always smarmy. Struck down by a need to buy Tupperware in late afternoon.

Mon June 22, 2009, 9:56 am: Trying to have a siesta but small terraces can be a nightmare, the Poles are roaring outside the window, a group of small kids are playing war games, cars zipping by, home-hospiced aulone’s bell rings with new rounds of red-faced nurses in green puntos.

Sun June 21, 2009, 2:54 am: Looking for a gimp to wash my hair.

Sat June 20, 2009, 10:19 am: Born in March not June (for the love of jaysus stop asking me). Conceived in June, invariably, as March is nine months later.

Sat June 20, 2009, 9:08 am: Taking pins & needled legs off for some cheap cava at the offie.

Sun June 14, 2009, 4:36 am: Off to Colchester to get bitten by small monkeys.

Sat June 13, 2009, 11:54 am: Missing Irish wind! Strong enough to throw orthopaedically fucked aulones onto the road, the type of wind that scares swans and changes the direction of men’s urine in laneways, the same wind that imprisons babies behind plastic pram sheets and makes dogs run in circles.

Thu June 11, 2009, 2:13 am: Released a Daddy Longlegs from a spider’s web in the jacks, lobbed him out the window and watched him get chased by a cat. Far more interesting than the Sunday papers. So sick of reading about f00ked up writers after they’re dead. Such and such was an alco, had strange sexual habits, was cruel to his wife, a bore to his kids, but still won prizes. Grrrhhhhh.

Wed June 10, 2009, 4:12 am: Has flu-lite but nonetheless it comes with one of those cat-claw-creeper grids on the lungs full of phlegm that rattles like a kid’s handheld windmill when I exhale. Is that too much information?

Tue June 9, 2009, 7:44 am: Just been scolded by two old dears for using her laptop in the cafe. “Excuse me!” white-haired bint roared. “You can’t use them in here unless the battery is dead!” Then she picked up the menu to clarify her bintedness, which was unclarifiable. WTF?

Tue June 9, 2009, 6:52 am: Thought of a way to restart civil war in the North….Blow up AIDA @ Belfast Festival, Queens…demise the intellectuals, academics, creative writers, PR heads, etc., and leave the scum to sort each other out in the many tanning salons, low-price beer halls & cheap ‘Ulster fry’ cafes.

Tue June 9, 2009, 3:50 am: Sick of laptop bondage.

Mon June 8, 2009, 2:22 pm: Ma is still bitching about the parents of the baby found in the drain, over a boiled egg.

Mon June 8, 2009, 8:26 am: American writers use words that sound like they’re made of sodium. Schmaltzy, for instance.

Sun June 7, 2009, 5:46 am: Just witnessed a moustached woman shoplift a slice of Sicilian lemon cheesecake from Cafe Nero in Belfast.

Sat June 6, 2009, 12:12 pm: Waiting on the Indian takeaway to arrive. Yer man is having some bombastically hot chicken scenario, I’m having a korma…some beers, etc. I am so easily pleased I don’t know how I’m not married.

Sat June 6, 2009, 8:57 am: Leffe beer & relaxing by a coal fire which is obscure for the month of June but nonetheless pleasant. Marvelling at other people’s self-protection rackets in the absence of her own.

Wed June 3, 2009, 6:49 pm: Bought a newspaper and learnt about a talking beetle in a volcano, more books on the private lives of dead authors, lingering articles about ‘depression’, the Lisbon Treaty, how to cook cabbage with cream and how the Queen ma’s legs shook during the Blitz.

Wed June 3, 2009, 4:46 am: In my next life I’ll be a solicitor’s wife hanging around the dishwasher with lambs wool knockers & constant grace.

Tue June 2, 2009, 3:32 pm: Went for an interview with a retard-publisher, then had pints in a pub where local loyalists hid behind plastic plants and made jokes about IRA bombs.

Tue June 2, 2009, 11:18 am: Received an email about carbon emissions training with spelling mistakes POLLUTING the text. Learn to spell before saving the planet, gobshite.

Tue June 2, 2009, 9:57 am: Fascinated by the PedEgg contraption on TV3 – you can save (in bulk) your shaved off foot skin and sprinkle as “parmesan” on enemy pasta dinners. Only €10 at Heatons!

Tue June 2, 2009, 4:40 am: Cheered to know there’s an alternative PURPLE to the dreaded Blue Loo that every spinster in Ireland has used since the death of De Valera & shoe polish.

Mon June 1, 2009, 4:01 pm: Church newsletter: a lecture date on ‘Mystics’ – Therese of Lisieux, Edith Stein, etc. – then underneath: ‘All About Geraniums’. Have geriatric Catholics started to look for God in the ground?

Every Republican under the sun, it seems, wants the Queen to apologise for the whole enchilada from Strongbow’s invasion of Ireland and the manky spud famine to Bloody Sunday (Part I & Part II). But won’t Elizabeth Windsor suffer enough faced with a barrage of Irish c’lebs from Amanda Brunker to Lorraine Keane − whose contribution to Irish culture has been to tell motorists to avoid the Kimmage crossroads during rush hour − to the bats-in-the-belfry yodels of Mary Byrne and the self piteous whines of a NAMA property developer? I’m assuming that Jedward will also be present, kickboxing at the cameras, demanding acreage of attention.

One group definitely not invited to the Royal hooley are those knockabout funsters in the Real IRA. They recently described the Queen’s 3-day junket as ‘the final insult’. Yet privately they’re probably salivating over the prospect of international broadcast attention from CNN, Sky News, NBC, and the BBC as they attempt to disrupt a blue-rinse pensioner lobbing some dried flowers on some very dead people in gardens normally occupied by Whacker, Thrasher, Basher and Redser, with their Nike logbags full of hypodermic needles and Druids cider.

To be serious for a moment though: after the national revulsion over Constable Ronan Kerr’s murder the dissies have now been gifted a chance of a propaganda-comeback. If they can turn parts of Dublin upside down as they did with the Love Ulster rally in 2006 they will score a publicity coup. The sight of globally renowned correspondents reporting live on the violence in Parnell St. will put the dissidents inflexibly back on the map. RSF has already announced their main demo starts at the Black Church behind Parnell Square (one time home to other dummies of a wax variety) where no doubt the track suit catwalk will charge like wildebeest towards a line of red-faced culchie Gardaí who’d give their left scrotum to be off-duty milling about with a Hurley stick somewhere bovine-deep in the midlands.

Security operations so far have involved a lot of Garda knocking on a lot of doors and ‘taking people’s names’ like they used to do back in the day of Garda Patrol (precursor to Crimecall) when a random Mrs Murphy’s garden gate was stolen. A pal who lives on Clonliffe Road backing onto Croke Park, which is part of Lizzy’s barnstorm, described how a country Guard knocked at her door and asked for her name and address. The name bit she could partially understand, but the address bit was a puzzle as he’d just knocked on her door after all! Bins have been confiscated, phone boxes soldered shut, student accommodation evacuated, sewers searched (perhaps even members of the voluntary Garda Reserve are manning the city drains and sewers?) All around Parnell Square the polished-bróga Special Branch have been not very discreetly placing sniper folk on sagging Edwardian rooftops in what I assume is an attempt to outwit other snipers belonging to more bothersome organisations who are way better at the gun thing and with more reason to use them. My bet is that an unemployed INLA man, unable to get onto a FÁS scheme due to the upsurge in quantity surveyors and solicitors hogging places, will send some bullets flying into the air, causing untold hysteria and horror, perhaps even a right royal stampede with Lizzy roaring, “Help! Help! My hat!” and De Duke saying: “Oh shit I say, here we go again old girl”.

The Twitter has been groaning with protestations all week: ‘What’s this about school children being drafted in to wave flags for queen’s visit? A reprehensible misuse of children,’ says Greystones branch of Sinn Féin. ‘Would ya really go on holiday to a place where the majority of the population want to see your head on a pike?’ asks another.

The tour is too long and is tempting fate. Already there are hoax bombs (London: yesterday, Maynooth and Inchicore Luas, this morning) and various ‘designed to disrupt’ shenanigans. There are too many venues and the opportunities are large for something to go badly wrong. Contrast with Obama who has just two venues to speak at before heading back into the burly blue sky. It would’ve been better if the Queen had tea & a few slices of McCambridges bread with Mary McAleese at Aras, followed by symbolic tree planting in the park, a pint of black stuff at Guinness Brewery and down to some stud farm in Kildare (where they’re all West Brits anyway) before heading back to Blighty. To put further blue fuel on verdigris flames, the geniuses in the Phoenix Park Gaff have invited UDA supremo Jackie McDonald and his loyalist entourage to Golden Bridge for the war dead ceremony. It’s a Tiramisu of farce, every day new and more flavoursome layers added.

Ireland, in the shitpit of fiscal smelliness, is forking out a fragrant €30 million to protect the Queen’s head and the Duke of Edinburgh’s torso (Philip’s uncle was blown up here). Costs could rise excessively if riots do erupt and British holiday-makers are scared off by the Queen’s getaway to the Emerald Isle ending in calamity. Fianna Fáil gambled and lost the banking industry through their disastrous 2008 bailout. Now, Fine Gael and Labour are gambling on one of the few businesses left in our economically ravaged country: tourism. Remember too that this prodigious PR stunt was planned as the final chapter in a long drawn-out peace process. However, if things go awry it could be the preface to an upsurge in Republican conflict all over again.

This is the biggest test of authority for the state since the 1981 hunger strike riots outside the British Embassy. The entire thing will be a sphincter-squeezing moment even if 10,000 strapping Guards, army and all 17 members of Special Branch manage to block the view of rampaging animals at the barricades. It will be like one of those icy moments out of sight in a Titanic lifeboat, where even from a polite distance there’s scant hope of drowning out the howls. The only good thing that could possibly happen if disaster strikes is Tonight with Vincent Brownewould be forced to change topic, if only for a week.

This post originally appeared on the Anti Room blog in May 2011 – to read the comments click here

In yesterday’s Irish Independent rambo-catholic David Quinn sought to portray himself as a martyr for free speech. Whilst he demonised women for seeking the morning after pill in Boots (preferring restraint or chastity!) Quinn also whined to high heaven about being the victim of repressive feminazis on Twitter. Poor Dave! Apparently some had the cheek to define his views on women’s control over their own bodies as ‘medieval’. He also claimed he’d been insulted and called a cunt. He scrambled about in the dark for 40 dazed seconds wondering ‘how we ever got to a point where there’s even a demand for a product like this’. The word demand here of course meaning a desire for sex outside of a committed relationship, such as a deluxe married one. There are no offers of stats accompanying this ancillary demand. Rather, he seems to have taken the product name: ‘Morning After Pill’ to heart, like Head & Shoulders shampoo could mean decapitation to a psycho. Availability of such a product will simply encourage the easily swayed fairer sex to indulge in quick-fix hot rampant park-n-ride humping at a moment’s notice.

The type of woman Dave sees wanting this pill: ‘Young, single women who were out on the tear over the weekend.’ Why don’t you just call them ‘slags’ and be done with it, someone snapped back on Twitter. Women scrambling for this €45 ‘abortifacient’ offering − in David’s comely eyes a kind of preemptive breakfast muffin termination − doesn’t seem to include 30 or 40-something women like me dealing with a burst condom scenario. Sorry Dave, but I do tend to like it a bit frantic and it’s happened twice, or a married woman worried her ordinary pill may not work after a bout of sickness/diarrhoea. And a myriad of other situations where emergency contraception is needed, including in cases of sexual assault. Imagine in the dark old days if such a service was available to women, especially young women who fell pregnant through incest, rape and abuse. And don’t say those scenarios were rare! If there was a morning after pill in 1983, for instance, maybe the young woman who died giving birth in that dreadful desolate place at Granard might never have been put in such a lethal position.

Instead, P for Pill in the Quinn context seems to spell PROMISCUITY to a congregation of tunnel visioners. He refers to pro-contraception folk as ‘moralising anti-moralisers’. It’s an inversion of the truth to portray those on the liberal side of the sexuality debate as the newfound ‘old right’. Such a dishonest move turns all logic and meaning on its head. ‘The problem with your thesis is that you want to legislate for an aspirational society that doesn’t, and may never, exist,’ another twitterer responded. Nor does he mention anywhere in his quickie-porridge-oats analysis, health concerns or issues surrounding the actual taking of the morning after pill. Even that would be a type of progress or perceptibility. He prefers to finger-wag at the female sexual gambol, citing that ‘demand can only be high where there is a high level of self-defeating, self-destructive behaviour’.

I seem to recall similar fears about the potential for mass-hysteria triggered divorces back in 1997 too. And God forbid if we should ever have abortion available in Ireland, we’ll be dashing out to get preggers just for the Nilfisk novelty of it all. While I’m all for the I Believe In Talking Snakes lobby having their divine say, it’s worth remembering that concrete church & state roadblocks obstructing liberalism began to crumble back in the late-1980s, when contraception became more freely available here in all its ambrosial forms. So the marauding tart tanked up on cheap booze and gagging for it without any prior contraception sorted, is tired nugatory nonsense. Coincidentally this change in our society arrived around the same time news broke in the international press of rampantly repressed Irish clergy brutally raping children on an industrial scale. Here’s hoping Boots launch a 2011 Here Cum The Girls campaign, with two for the price of one thrown in for good measure. In the meantime you can read Dave’s latest sermon here − I’m off out to buy some lube and jump on the first cock I see.

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This post originally appeared on the Anti Room blog in January 2011. To read the comments click here

TODAY is the day when spirits are let loose by divine dignitaries to mingle with the living and even the half living or those who are long dead but are still refusing to lie down. Not just ordinary ghosts either but sinful smelly souls – destined to return in the bodies of animals – black cats, dodgy donkeys, foaming-at-the-mouth dogs, etc. This year’s ghoul factor is on a special state of high alert with the addition of dozens of ghost estates, zombie hotels and abandoned train stations for never-to-be-built towns. Originally Halloween sprang out of the celebrations of the Celtic/Druid pagans of our sumptuous shores, as well Scotland, Wales and Brittany. Every October 31st, these groups celebrated the return of winter, as well as honouring Samhain (not to be confused with salmon, another Irish export) a kind of Celtic lord of the dead geezer. On the feast of Samhain, the Celts celebrated by telling lengthy yarns about their ancestors. They also made desperate fraught attempts to glimpse into the future: a practice which has now been more or less replaced by tarot, angel card and aura readings, mediumship, psychotherapy and TV3’s Tonight with Vincent Browne.

De Oirish have played a huge part in Halloween right from the off. Even contemporary “jack-o-lantern” – popular in the US – was named in honour of an Irish blacksmith “Jack” who St. Peter refused into heaven and Satan barred out of hell. As a result, Jack’s spirit was doomed to rove the planet, with only a scabby coal from hell in his hollowed out pumpkin to light his pitiful passage. Even our “Help the Halloween Party!” childhood cry for a trough-load of e-numbers stretches back to the 17th century peasant tradition of darting about asking for gifts of food on Halloween in the name of St. Columbia, an Irish priest who established an early form of social welfare.

Another slant is the plastic Halloween masks that have their roots in Celtic myth and legend. Fearful folk wore disguises when heading outdoors on Halloween so roaming spirits, with a bone to pick with the living, wouldn’t recognise them. Celtic Druids dressed up in elaborate costumes to disguise themselves as spirits and devils so as to avoid real ghosts, ghouls, witches, vampires, goblins, zombies, mummies, skeletons, werewolves and demons. This practice was later adapted into the wearing of balaclavas by the Provisional IRA and various gangland criminals during bank robberies. Swingers from Kildare – to this day – wear eye-masks in case business people and high-ranking legislators recognise each other in the course of sexual duty.

A quick glance at this weekend’s papers discloses another startling Halloween phenomenon. Modern-day Irish folk believe in ghosts more than ever. It can even look super on your CV. Former Miss World Rosanna Davison admitted this weekend she was haunted by a young maid when a kid. ‘The model made the spooky Halloween confession as she told how she was left terrified after coming face to face with the spirit in her sprawling family home,’ the Irish Daily Mirror article read. “I saw the spirit of a young girl in my house when I was about 11 – it was in one of the downstairs back rooms and it was terrifying. I just stared at her for ages and my heart was racing but eventually I lost the bottle and ran away. Last year I discovered through the 1911 census online that the room where I saw the ghost was a young maid’s bedroom”.

Paul O’Halloran an ex-soldier from Connemara insists in The Sun that he’s ‘a strong connection with the other world as a result of a near-death experience in Lebanon’. Most of the dead souls that contact him are simply looking to be released, he reckons. “If there is a spirit or an energy in a house, I can remove these energies and help to heal the situation,” he said. He also told the newspaper how he can see ghosts in the most unlikely places, even when he’s taking time off to sup the pints. “I go for a pint and they come up and tap me on the shoulder. They’re just looking for help. If people die suddenly or with guilt, they often have a connection with a person or place and they don’t want to leave.”

Ghosts (taidhbhse) and general purpose dead things can also be very good for live business. Old pubs, haunted castles, spooky hotels and bog-standard bogs are all fodder for an industry that is flagging under the strain of recession. From Jonathan Swift’s mental hospital ghost in James’ Street to a bloodied butcher in the ruins of a house in North Dublin, years after he’d cut his throat in 1863…we just love to be petrified at any cost. The ghost of Archbishop Narcissus Marsh still haunts the Marsh Library (especially during the tourist season), sadly searching for a letter from his eloping niece. The Olympia theatre ghost never bores of following/floating around after actors in the staff dressing room during rehearsals. Eerie tales of a Cork poltergeist in a house in Hollyhill too (96fm covered the story). Every corner of Ireland is haunted and if it’s not, it soon will be. An international Paranormal Directory of Ghosts describes Irish ghouls as: ‘ranging in size from the nearly invisible to the huge, from tiny sprites to giant headless horsemen. Some of them are vengeful, some mischievous, some helpful.’ Hopefully this is useful while on the lookout later today.

Another story in the Irish Daily Mirror concerns psychic medium Angie Freeland, who claims she videoed a spirit moving a torch in the historic Wicklow’s gaol. It led to Angie’s Halloween ‘vigil’ selling out in record time. Angie dressed in the traditional costume of the gaol’s matron Mary Morris in the hope of drawing a reaction from the spirits. It allegedly worked as when Angie reached for the torch it chillingly moved towards her, sliding across the table on its own in the spooky schoolroom.

“I’ve been overwhelmed by the intense paranormal activity since I first came to the gaol. Now the public can view the evidence for themselves,” she said. You can also ghost hunt 16-year-old Helena Blunden from the comfort of your DFS couch. She fell to her death from the stairs of a Belfast mill in 1912. The ‘live cam’ project on the Ireland’s Eye website has been on the go 24/7 since 1998 and is still visited by millions every year. What’s left to say except happy apple bobbing, stay safe, eat plenty of Barnbrack. If you do happen to have Samhainophobia or other phobias such as fear of cats (ailurophobia), witches (wiccaphobia), ghosts (phasmophobia), spiders (arachnophobia), the dark (nyctophobia), and cemetaries (coimetrophobia), it might be an idea to stay indoors till Monday. But please do get in touch if you’ve a decent ghost story to share…

Have a goo at this wonderful snippet (below) from Stephen Fry where he argues that the Catholic church is not – to put it at its mildest – a force of good in the world. It ain’t new but the topics he covers are timeless. He believes in the Enlightenment, in the eternal adventure of trying to discover moral truth at your own pace. By contrast he sees the church as a benighted outdated institution that’s causing a lot of pain. He also labels it as utterly sex obsessed:

“They say that we, with our permissive society and our rude jokes, are sex obsessed. But no! We have a healthy attitude. We like it. It’s fun, it’s jolly…because it’s a primary impulse, it can be dangerous and dark and difficult. It’s a bit like food in that respect only even more exciting. The only people who are obsessed with food are anorexics or the morbidly obese. That, in erotic terms, is the Catholic church in a nutshell.”

Aside from discussing damnation, original sin, the ‘moral evil’ of homosexuality, the horrors of child rape, how The Ratzinger spread the absurd word that condoms actually help spread AIDS, he also makes reference to how religion has always been implacably opposed to women’s choice in their own bodies and destinies. Let me know what you think. It’s Sunday in the financially corrupt holy nub of Ireland after all…

Some questions I’ve asked myself & now ask you:

What is God? If we’re made in his image, how come we all look different?

Do you believe in talking snakes and women made from snapped-off ribs?

Have you ever had a genuine ’religious’ experience that confounded you?

What would women priests bring to the Catholic religion if Rats & Co. gave the eminent go-ahead?

Is religion extinct as a dodo or salvageable/relevant?

Did the Holy Spirit turn up at your Confirmation?

What age were you before you found out Jesus had siblings?

Was the Billings Method ever explained to you in sex education?

Do you agree/disagree with Aristotle who said: The gods too are fond of a joke?